


What Shadows Can See

by commoncomitatus



Category: Defiance (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-27
Updated: 2013-05-27
Packaged: 2017-12-13 03:23:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/819389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Irisa's thoughts at the end of "The Serpent's Egg".</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Shadows Can See

She is a warrior.

That’s her identity. It’s the fire in her veins, the quickening of her heart, the colour of her blood. It’s her nature, and it cannot be extinguished even by Nolan and his absurd human nurturing.

She’s probably a whole lot closer to humanity than most of her kind, and she’s still not entirely sure whether that’s a good or a bad thing – she wants to say it’s bad, but the tiny corner of her that concedes he maybe hasn’t done too terrible a job of raising her wouldn’t want to seem ungrateful – but it is what it is. She may live like a human, behave like a human, call a human ‘father’, but she is not human, and she never will be.

She is Irathient. She is a warrior. And, though many of her natural instincts have become diluted under his care, that is one thing Nolan has never broken her of.

Mostly, she supposes, because he hasn’t really tried to. He’s taught her the basics – right and wrong, good and bad, why it’s important to keep her weapons sheathed in polite company – but he seems to accept, albeit grudgingly, that it’s too much to expect her to actually heed him. Most likely, he puts it down to the perils of raising a rebellious child, the same tribulations faced by any unexpected parent. Less likely, but still possible, she supposes he might have allowed himself to think a little more deeply about her not-so-human nature. She rather doubts that, though; he is Nolan, after all, and he’s nothing if not a master when it comes to ignoring the things he doesn’t want to deal with.

Not that it matters, anyway. Whatever his reasons – and Irisa has long since given up trying to make sense of his reasons for doing anything – he accepts the shortcomings of their situation, and the facts of the matter remain the same. She can keep company with him, can care about him, or even love him, but she is not one of his people. She was not made to be like him, and she can’t be expected to behave as he does.

Case in point: he tried to teach her table manners once. Needless to say, it did not end well.

There is no doubt in her mind that it’s been a struggle for him. Raising an Irathient child can’t be easy, and all the more so when it’s a child like her, but she tries not to think about that too much or too often. He’s a good father, at least for the most part, and she tries not to let herself wonder how much trouble she’s caused for him, how much of a tightrope her existence must have been for him to walk. The metaphor is an amusing one – Nolan has never been graceful, much less acrobatic – but it’s accurate enough to sting and silence the laughter before it surfaces; he has tried, and still does, to be a great many things that he is not, and all for her sake.

She, cocky rebel that she is, has never tried so hard for him.

And maybe that’s his influence exerting itself, because that’s one way in which they’re exactly the same. They are both the same kind of cowards, experts in the subtle art of hiding from the things they don’t want to see. For her, it’s far easier to play the wild child, the surly daughter with a bad attitude, than to reconcile the idea that raising her might have forced him to sacrifice parts of himself. And for him, it’s easier to pretend his daughter is simply a brat than to accept that there might be parts of her beyond his grasp.

It’s not that she holds fast to her Irathient heritage. She doesn’t. She is no stubborn child, clinging to a home and family tragically lost. No, her story is not like that at all, and she would never claim it is. She owes her people nothing, her family even less, but their race is hers just the same. Their blood is in her, flowing thick and dark beneath skin that will never be the same colour as Nolan’s, and she can no more ignore the way it pulses than Nolan could have renounced his humanity had he been raised Castithan. Some seeds are buried too deep to ever be uprooted, and that’s true of these parts of her, the Irathient warrior that Nolan never tried to transplant. Whether she wants them or not, they are there, growing inside of her, and it would be pointless to pretend otherwise.

Nolan, for all of his shortcomings, seems to understand that, and he’s never pushed her to become anything more or less than what she is. He wants her to be a good person, of course, perhaps even a better one than she has the power to be, but through all that suffocating dotage, he’s never tried to rewrite who she is. There are fundamental differences between them, differences that cannot be swept away or ignored, no matter how hard either of them may wish it, and to hope for some kind of miracle metamorphosis would be to invite disappointment. She is his daughter, by choice as much as by circumstance, and she would follow him to the grave if she had to (and she has no doubt that one day she will), but he is human, and she is simply not capable of bending her body into that shape.

But then, there are some parts of her that are a little bit like him, too. Not entirely, but enough to make her upbringing clear even to her own people. Those tend to be the parts that she doesn’t really like in herself, the parts that feel like they go against who and what she’s supposed to be. They’re the parts of her that don’t bite his hand off when he tries to ruffle her hair, the parts that secretly don’t hate his cloying compassion or his terrible taste in music as much as she pretends to, the parts that actually kind of enjoy those days-long road trips through the middle of nowhere. They’re the parts that glow when he flashes that ‘we’re gonna get in trouble’ grin, the parts that sting behind her eyes when he looks at her like she really is his daughter, the parts that can’t imagine any other life than the one he’s made for her.

She suspects they’re also the parts he’s most proud of, and they’re definitely the only parts he really connects with. He’d never admit it aloud, of course, and she would never ask him to, but that doesn’t make it any less true, and thinking about it for too long makes her chest go tight with emotions that have no name in either of their native languages. It feels like the worst kind of promise, like watching a tiny crack expand into a gaping chasm, a little wider with every year she grows, and her heart seizes with a kind of pain that is so much worse than all the horror she’s lived because she can’t fight it with weapons.

Not that any of this matters right now, anyway, because Nolan isn’t here, and the parts of her that bear the brand of his upbringing are deathly silent.

Here and now and in this moment, she is not Joshua Nolan’s daughter. She’s not the sharp-tongued Irathient girl reared by a soft-hearted human – a big mouth brought up by a big soul, bad attitude raised on bad ideas – or anything nearly so ironic. She can’t feel the suffocating warmth of his compassion now, and she can’t hear the battered radio backbeat of his terrible taste in music. The old-world lullabies that used to send her to sleep as a frightened child might have brought a moment’s solace if she could remember them, but the words elude her and the rhythms are foggy and distant like the ghosts of unwanted dreams.

Nolan’s presence is a ghost here too, and the spectral memory of his arms around her does little to bring her comfort when there are other spectres stalking so much closer.

Memory is a strange adversary, and its power is absolute. That’s why Irisa fears it so much. She is a warrior, a master with weapons and expert in combat, but memory is slippery and intangible, deceptive and honest in equal measure and it’s impossible to tell one side from the other. Memory can keep its secrets hidden, veiled in a depthless fog of forgetfulness, or weave a blanket of lies so convincing that even its victim starts believing them to be true. Memory can be anything it likes, or nothing at all, and there is no defence when it sounds its battle cry.

Irisa’s memory is not perfect. There are gaps so wide that she can’t imagine how anything tangible has managed to cross them at all, gaping holes that leave her wondering if perhaps she imagined the whole thing after all. It churns in her stomach, lashes at her back, blinds and baffles and breaks her, indistinct and rippling with doubt and confusion, the silence so loud that it sometimes drives her mad.

Nolan tells her that it’s normal, that it’s understandable, that it’s okay. He calls it ‘post-traumatic stress’, but that always sounds like an excuse.

Post-traumatic stress. It’s one of his favourite phrases, and he uses it far more frequently than he should. Over time, it’s become a kind of security blanket for him, a convenient whitewash for the behaviours he doesn’t like and an easy dismissal for the ones he doesn’t understand. It’s a way of offering validation without justification, an expertly-sewn curtain to sweep out of sight everything in her that he doesn’t approve of but knows he can’t change.

He thinks she’s too young – or maybe too alien – to understand what he’s doing, what it’s really about, but she’s not. She knows exactly what he means when he says ‘post-traumatic stress’, and she can hear the words he doesn’t say just as clearly as the ones he does. The charade is futile; it’s not fooling either of them, and every time he recycles it, it becomes a little more meaningless, the taste a little more unpalatable. One day, she knows, it will become poison to them both.

There is no Irathient translation, at least none that she knows of. If her people have a similar concept, she doesn’t know what it is. Frankly, she doesn't care to, either. Nolan’s over-use of the phrase has dulled her senses to it, turned her against any merits it might have held; like a petulant child, she’s inclined to rebel against it solely because it’s intended for her own good. She is older now than she was, far too old to be told how to feel or what to think. Certainly, she’s too old for Nolan to try and sand down her sharpest edges just because they unnerve him. She’s not a child any more, and she’ll never be human; the longer Nolan clings to his delusions, the more dangerous they are.

Recent events have made that very clear.

But this isn’t about that, and she has enough to think about without letting herself become preoccupied by something that still doesn’t make sense. There will be time enough to dwell on that later, but for now she can’t afford the distraction. Because this is something else entirely. This is not about her so-called second sight, an Irathient gift distorted by a glassy-eyed human. It’s not about the visions that have haunted her for almost as long as she can remember, and it’s not about the way that Nolan tried to cover her eyes, shielding her like a good human father from the idea that there might be something in the great wide world that he doesn’t understand.

It’s not about what he doesn’t know. It’s about what she does.

As unpleasant as it is to admit, it’s about post-traumatic stress.

Because it’s true; there is no other way to define this. Certainly, there is no Irathient word, at least none that she knows of, and even if there were another human word, she lacks the patience to find it right now. Her mind is tying itself into knots trying to process the weight of what she’s feeling, the feral rage of an Irathient warrior coupling impossibly with the pleading sobs of a tortured child. She feels unhinged, almost feral, as though every fibre of her being has been stretched to breaking point, ready to snap without warning. She feels uncontrolled, and that’s a dangerous thing for a warrior to be.

Her blood is burning, molten metal spilling out into the spaces between her veins, and her thoughts are a crimson haze of half-spoken words and razor-wire emotions, feelings rubbed so raw that even trying to name them makes her bleed, makes her fists clench into white-knuckle weapons and her wrists strain and struggle against phantom shackles.

She remembers. Flashes of memory so clear that she could reach out and touch them if she wanted to. She could lose herself in the darkness, suffocate in the stifling echoes of muffled voices, retch against the stench of him. It’s so sharp, so pure and perfect, recreated with the kind of accuracy that can only come with long-faded memories, the certainty of everything so much clearer for being so distant. She recoils from blows that have not been struck for years, flinches against the cut of words that have long been silent, cries out against assailants that are no longer there. Her nerves scream at how real it feels, even as her mind scrambles to piece together the broken fragments lost to time.

Because Irisa’s memory is definitely not perfect. The holes and gaps are still there, even as the rest leaves her blind and scrabbling for purchase in other places. Tiny details carved out from her mind with all the precision a surgeon’s scalpel, pinprick points hollowed out in her head without consent, the bittersweet artistry of self-preservation at work. Colours bled out until they’re blurry and indistinct, voices slurred and muffled until they’re discordant and remote, static chaos softening the edges of pain until there’s not enough left to feel. Everything reshaped and twisted, even the tangible turned into something new, until she can no longer be sure what memories are there at all.

She remembers, yes, but never the whole. Never too much, and – paradoxically – never enough either. It’s laughable when she thinks of the horrors that she does remember, absurd to think that she wants more. Brutality, torture, nightmares, trauma. Nobody should want to remember those things, much less more than they already do, but the picture she holds in her head is incomplete, and it drives her to the edge of insanity to know that the missing parts are there but beyond her reach.

The pain she bears is not enough; she aches for those missing details, those hollow pinpricks. They itch underneath her skin, teasing her with their existence even as they slip through her fingers, as fine as sand and just as wasteful, and she would tear herself asunder if it would crush them to diamonds, sharp enough to cut her open instead of slipping worthlessly away.

And there it is, in all its ironic human glory – Nolan’s precious ‘post-traumatic stress’. The holes in her head, the fractures in her memory, the empty spaces that don’t make any sense. What small part of her that can be rational knows she should be grateful, realises that every detail forgotten is a nightmare she doesn’t have to sweat through, but she can’t bring herself to think like that. She can only think like the tortured child she once was, frightened and lost, hopelessly trying to cut through the tangled ropes of misplaced memories that hold her bound and tied.

She remembers blue eyes. Malice cut like a jewel, clear and bright as coldfire, swirling shades of a colour she’s come to hate, a mosaic of cloudless skies and unending oceans. She remembers it all so clearly, so vividly, so completely... but she looked into his eyes and they were orange. Undeniable, inescapable. Orange. And now there are new memories making space inside her, the coldfire blue of her nightmares supplanted and turned to fire, the cloudless skies choking on acrid smoke as the oceans boil and bubble and burst into flame, and it’s not what she remembered yesterday, but today it’s become true.

It sears and scars, crawls along her skin and eats at her from underneath, turning her hot and itchy. She wants to scratch, to claw at the heat until it burns itself out, to score words and patterns in wide-open cuts, to paint the surrounding skin with blood-daubed fingertips until blue and orange both turn red, but she knows that doing that will only leave a different kind of scar. Imaginary wounds – even ones that spawn from real pain – cannot be cauterised by sharp nails or dull blades, and Nolan has made her promise not to do that. And so, because he’s her father and she loves him, she doesn’t.

She breathes deep instead, and keeps her hands away from the places that hurt, away from the licking flames and whispering memories, away from the blazing orange fires and the receding mists of coldfire blue, away from the pale scars on her wrists and the dark spots on her mind. She blocks out the heat as best she can, and tries to ignore the itch, but it’s not easy and Nolan isn’t there to cradle her and tell her that one day it will be. She loves him and wants to make him proud, but he’s not here to be her father now, and it’s always so much harder to do what he wants to when he’s not there to tell her what that is.

Because, again, she isn’t like him. She’s a warrior, headstrong and aggressive, and this is not anything she knows how to endure. She doesn’t know how to fight without weapons, doesn’t know how to cauterise wounds – even imaginary ones – without blood, doesn’t know how to combat pain except with more of the same. She doesn’t know how to respond to things like this by herself. She only knows what Nolan has told her, but it’s impossible to remember that right now. It’s impossible to hear his words when he’s not speaking, impossible to feel his compassion when he’s not wrapping her up in it, impossible to be his daughter when he’s not there to be her father... 

...impossible, most of all, to be human when she’s not.

Tommy LaSalle is human. He’s nothing like Nolan, though, and that’s enough to draw the lines in her mind away from her father. Yes, they both possess the same sickening infatuation with doing the right thing, and the same obsessive compassion, but that’s where the similarity ends. LaSalle is young and foolish, and where Nolan has been made strong and hard by life and experience, he is green and fragile. He’s little more than a boy, really, and there’s no doubt in Irisa’s mind that he will find his peace in an early grave. Probably one he’s dug himself, now that she thinks of it; he’s certainly stupid enough.

Nolan is stupid too, most of the time, but it’s a different kind of stupid. Nolan has lived, has seen and fought and endured; he has survived. Nolan is a man, and he has earned the right to be stupid. LaSalle is a boy dressed up as a man, a child scraping with bare fingers at weather-beaten dirt in the hopes of scrabbling out a name for himself, or perhaps of uncovering his identity. He is stupid because he can’t be anything else, because he lacks the wits to be more. No, he is not like Nolan at all.

And maybe that’s a good enough reason for this, the way that she seeks succour and sanctuary in his body. He’s human, he’s here, and he’s nothing like Nolan. Maybe that’s enough.

For now, anyway, it feels like it is. It won’t drive the demons from her mind, of course, but it’s enough in this moment to ease the relentless itch beneath her skin, to lend a little colour to the shades of grey that fill the holes in her head, to numb the aching need to scratch and claw at imaginary wounds. It’s enough, in this moment, that he can claim to understand what nightmares taste like, enough that she can see a familiar spark of memory behind his eyes when they meet hers, enough that he can meet her eyes at all and not flinch.

For tonight, at least, it’s enough.

She can feel the sensation radiating off him, turning his skin warm and absorbing the flames from her own. It’s not a permanent solution, of course, but it’s a temporary one and that’s as much as she can ever hope for. She has lived with this all her life, and she knows that it won’t go away. Not overnight, and probably not ever. For as long as she’s breathing, she’ll feel the weight of it bearing down on her, the memories she knows, the ones she’s no longer sure of, the ones she can’t grasp at all. The serpent is always there, and it always will be, coiled and waiting for the perfect moment to drive its poison into her veins over and over and over.

It happened, all of it, and whatever tricks her mind may play on her today or tomorrow, that won’t ever change. It happened, and she’s not so foolish as to ever expect it will go away simply because she’s looked into the eyes of the man who did it. No, the nightmares will continue, just as they always have, and there’s nothing she can do about that. She can only hope against hope that, when she takes the memories to her grave, the smell of death will block out the stench of him.

Post-traumatic stress. It burns up her blood in the veins the fire can’t reach, lights up her nerves in the places LaSalle’s touch leave cold, drives her to think and say and do things that no sane person would. It’s inside her, a part of her, rooted every bit as deeply as her Irathient heritage, thorns that could tear a man to pieces just as easily as her warrior’s instincts. It’s a ridiculous phrase, a stupid human concept, but it has taken hold of her even so, squeezing at her lungs just as Nolan’s influence squeezes at her heart, and though she hates the way he makes it sound like an excuse, it’s just like him because she cannot deny its place inside her.

But this is no time to be thinking of Nolan. She’s supposed to be thinking of Tommy LaSalle, of the way he shifts and slides beneath her, of the sweat that pricks his skin and douses hers. He’s responsive, and the language of his body is easy for her to translate. It’s easier to speak to him now than it is when they’re both clothed and covered, and so she takes what she can while she can. Takes, without asking. He is here and he is naked, and that’s all she needs him to be. There is no affection here, no love, and only the tiniest sliver of respect. She doesn’t feel anything for him – the whole point of this is to keep herself from feeling anything at all – and it’s not her problem if he’s looking at her through human eyes.

He can deal with his feelings however he wants. Right now, all she cares about is numbing the pain.

Because it still hurts. It hurts to think, and it hurts not to think. Even now, the pain endures, a constant hum of low-level static in body and mind alike. It won’t ever be silenced, but it is muffled while she is doing this, distorted by the pricking of sweat and the shifting slide. Being with Tommy LaSalle is not an end to anything, least of all the pain, but it is an effective silencer, and that’s all she wants. This is a simple numbing agent, nothing more, and it’s perfect because its simplicity does not dilute its potency; it touches every part of her at once, drowning out the mnemonic taste of serpent’s venom, and she swallows down as much of it as she can.

The body can only process so many sensations in a given moment, and Irisa knows her own body well enough to know that what is real will always override what is not. It’s why her fingers are branding deep lines in the skin of his shoulders, the heat-slick muscle proving an acceptable substitute for the fire-burned imaginary wounds. She’s not allowed to do this to herself, and so instead she will do what she always has – use the available resources as best she can.

Tommy LaSalle is a good resource, yes, but that’s all he is. His body makes hers feel good, forces her mind to focus on something solid, gives her enough adrenaline to fight down the nightmares for another day, and his skin is a sweet-tasting contrast to her own. He does a half-decent job, for the most part, though she wishes he wasn’t so gentle about the whole thing; she can understand, she supposes, why he might think it’s what she wants – there’s that stupid human compassion rearing its head in all the wrong ways – but it’s not. She’s not one of his pretty human girls, and this isn’t some kind of romance. She’s here because it’s the best available option, because she wants to possess and control, because she wants to feel like her body is her own even as her mind is not. She’s here because she wants to take back her thoughts, because she wants to bend and reshape them into something that’s not broken, to reclaim herself, to rebrand the trauma-touched memories with something less painful. It’s a necessity – a pleasant one, yes, but a necessity just the same – and frankly, it would be a whole lot better if she didn’t have to contend with his absurd gentleness.

Honestly, it’s taking most of her strength to keep from telling him to stop being so _human_ about it all.

Still, though it’s far from perfect, it’s enough for now, and that’s all she can ask for. For all his human weaknesses, Tommy LaSalle will give her what she needs, and she will remember how to be strong, how to be Irathient, how to be a warrior. She will come back to herself tonight, and rise with the sun in the morning, reborn and reawakened. It’s enough.

Tommy will get her through tonight, surely enough, and by tomorrow she’ll have found something else. Something fresh and new and different, something with a sharper sting or a stronger taste. Something that will keep the fire from reigniting in her veins, keep her nerves singing instead of screaming, keep her mind from clouding over with fog-touched phantoms. Something that will hold the memories at bay, hold the wayward thoughts inside, hold down the terrified sobs of a tortured child. Something that will get her through another day.

And then she’ll find another something for the day after, and something else for the day after that, again and again and again until the day she wakes up and realises that, somehow, she’s survived.

Because that’s what it all means, right? Isn’t that how this ‘post-traumatic stress’ nonsense works? 

Maybe not. Maybe it’s how warriors work, or how Irathients work, or how the world works. Maybe...

...maybe it’s just how Irisa works.

And maybe that’s all that matters.


End file.
